My own chess engine

I’ve written a chess engine named Slonik. It implements the Universal Chess Interface (UCI), so you can download any popular chess interface, like Scid vs Pc. or Chessbase, to analyze with or play against Slonik.

I’ve written this engine from scratch, and chose to write it in Python, so that I can iterate quickly. That makes the engine slower, but maybe one day I will port it to C++. However, I am happy with it’s playing strength, all considering. The details of the engine are on the github page, but to summarize:

Alpha-beta minimax, quiescence search

Bitboard piece/board representation

Various search heuristics, such as the history heuristic, extensions, reductions, etc.

Hand-coded evaluation function

Transposition hash table

I plan to return to working on this engine’s AI — specifically to use deep learning and reinforcement learning techniques rather than the current hand-coded evaluation function.